


This one, they can save

by Perspicacia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-08-28 06:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8434786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia
Summary: “We don’t have a lot of time,” Kenobi says. “This is dangerous, this is insubordination, this is insanity and somewhere the spirit of my old Master is making himself sick laughing, but you and I will evacuate our young friend, and Anakin will cover for us, and declare the shuttle we’ll be… let’s say liberating, lost in this fight.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to aeremaee on tumblr, a wonderful beta!

One crisis at a time. Pulling another miracle out of nowhere, saving another battle, grieving for another childhood friend, mourning for lost love… Sometimes Obi-wan wants to just stand there, still as a rock, his eyes closed - not like a corpse, he had seen too much of those to think again about the calm of the dead, but like an enchanted sleeper of old younglings’ tales. To sleep, to sleep eternally, and let the restless typhoon of the war pass. But that was not the way of life he had been taught, so in darkest times he doesn’t ask the Force for an end to his struggles, only for the strength to bear his burden and to lighten the burden of others.

The galaxy is not fair, the Force is no nursemaid, every glimpse of the future is only infinite sadness and in that time of trial to endure is the only thing within his power. So he does. Sometimes he fails, and he mourns, sometimes they succeed, and they go to another skirmish.

But he can feel approaching a moment where something will break and he will do something stupid.

 

******

One battle at a time. One dead brother at time. Seeing squadron after squadron of brothers disappearing. One planet at a time. And the young ones, way too fresh from the decanter, their eyes haunted after their first battle, after the first time they saw a brother going down and must leave him on a foreign soil, because there is no time. But what soil wasn’t foreign for them? One by one, his brothers die and Rex mourns, and yells at the new troops when they do something stupid, and drinks with Wolffe or Bly when they can. It doesn’t seem likely it will get better, not before he’s long dead, at this rhythm. Younger, he would have prayed to Jango, like all the young ones on Kamino, but now he has seen enough of the world, heard enough, to know better. Jango Fett was only one man and didn’t even care about them. So he fights, he protects, he endures, disillusioned with the Republic but still ready to die for it.

The galaxy is not fair and the Republic is a cruel mother. That doesn’t stop Rex from bleeding for it.

But he can feel approaching a moment where something will break and he will need to do something, like Slick did, no matter how uninformed and crazy he was.

 

It all changes with Boba, furious little thing, cruel in a way few of his brothers can be. He kills three men in his scrambling plan for revenge. Rex entrusts their names to the interminable list of fallen brothers that the clones attach, discreetly, to subspace communications, without permission, without Jedi’s opinions. Every dead soldier, a name using the waves to fly through space, touching everything, everywhere. He likes to imagine the wave will go farther than the Outer Rim, he likes to daydream that their names will live eternally, flying through space. Seeing everything that their brothers were denied.

After coding their names he spends precious minutes that he doesn’t have - so much work, so little time - to repeat them.

Lieutenant Ellimrac. A flash of a smile, black hair, and the most ridiculous facial hair ever seen in a brother, sideburns dyed purple. He had chosen for himself the name of a fruit, a little green thing with spikes, and more trouble than it was worth to eat its flesh.

Tan and Milky. Identical hair and matching tattoos on their backs. Rex always thought they were closer than brothers. Perhaps it was a mercy they were killed by the same bomb.

Rex visits the brig. He wants to see that child that looks like them, but was born as a soninstead of a clone, that child that thought he would have everything and fatherly love too, and is now bombing them in a mad quest for revenge.

Perhaps Rex is too young, despite his adult body. Perhaps he’s naïve. Perhaps something is wrong with his genetic modifications and he’s slowly going crazy, but he doesn’t think revenge is helping anything or anyone.

If little Fett kills Windu, then what? Will Jango Fett be reborn from the sands of Geonosis? They will only be more orphaned, as the Jedi will have a General less and the Jedi are the edge of the Grand Army.

Revenge is not the Jedi way, Rex had heard, once, something that General _Aayla Secura_ had taught Bly. It should be nobody’s way, in Rex’s opinion. He has seen it on plane after planet, city after city. When you don’t keep a very attentive eye on the civilians after a city is retaken from the Seppies, it’s power grabs and assassinations. _But he was a traitor, but her father was a collaborator, but, but, but…_

Probably the same when the Seppies take a city from them.

It’s those things he has every intention to tell his brot…his neph…his clo….to tell Boba Fett. The kid is not obliged to die like all of them. This one, he can save. Boba has a unique opportunity, like no other clone. He will probably be punished for the bomb, but you don’t imprison children, war orphans. After that, he could…he could be everything. Rex has a limited understanding of life outside the army, but Boba could be a farmer, like Cut, or he could make those delicious pastries Rex had once, after an attack when a young father, grateful for the clones that had saved his family, had baked for them when they were waiting for transport, or he could write holodramas or he could design ships or… anything.

With every step down the corridor the image of Boba as a ward of Cut is becoming clearer. He could still become a pastry-maker, or whatever you call them, later. Rex is not green enough to think revenge will stop being his primary goal so quickly, and Cut will be more capable of stopping Boba from fleeing than any institution for war orphans they intend to send him to.

It’s only an hour later that he understands they have no intention to send him to an orphanage. It will be prison for young Boba. Generals Skywalker and Kenobi are yelling at each other. Well, General Skywalker is yelling at General Kenobi, because the ginger-haired Jedi pushed for another solution. _Do you want him to kill more clones? How many times must I tell you they’re good men?_ and other hurtful things like that, like his old mentor wasn’t one of the most prudent with his men’s lives. General Kenobi is shaping himself up all proper Jedi, in that way they have where they seem to freeze from human to something other, and making little remarks about the compassion as a Jedi quality his ex-Padawan is too often forgetting, and other Jedi aphorisms about letting go of the dead, because they can do nothing more for them, but they can still help young Boba.

And then General Skywalker says other terrible things, and Rex feels obligated to step in before the altercation escalates even more out of control. He has seen those two at each other’s throats after the Hardeen mess and it wasn’t pretty; it was vicious and unnatural. They are almost - but only almost - back to normal, and he would like to keep it that way: his life is easier like that. And he doesn’t like when General Kenobi looks distant and harder like he does right now. He prefers the man human and smiling. It makes him feel stupid things that he revisits alone in his bunk at night, warming his soul with impossible dreams.

“I know a place where Boba Fett could go. A place that’s safe, for himself and others. And with kids, so he could be doing… er, kid stuff.”

He doesn’t know who is the most surprised at his intervention, he or the Jedi, but he’s nothing but strong, even when two force-trained humans are looking at him like that, that very very very strange faraway look, when they feel something that he will never touch.

“Did you feel it? Did you feel it, Master?” Skywalker asks, his voice suddenly more young, and forgetting his efforts – both recent and post Hardeen chaos - to not call the older man that, out of childish pique.

“Yes, I did,” Kenobi says, examining Rex the way a bird of prey would examine a small rodent.

“Sir?” he asks, not very comfortable with the grey eyes pinning him down.

“Something just unlocked. Something… like a great trial that will not pass, because of your words. It doesn’t resolve our problems with young Boba,” General Kenobi remarks, and then their two heads swipe to the side, in an identical movement.

“Grievous,” they groan, and ten seconds after that the alarms are reverberating throughout the ship.

Rex makes himself forget about Boba. Duty calls.

Ten hours later he hears the brig was destroyed, and he doesn’t have time for more than a quick regret before an arm suddenly grabs him and he finds himself in an empty room, with General Kenobi pressing a bacta patch to his head and grimacing, General Skywalker, tunic slightly charred, and Boba Fett trussed up like Representative Biggs that time he tried to demonstrate something to the 212th about Gungan binders.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Kenobi says. “This is dangerous, this is insubordination, this is insanity and somewhere the spirit of my old Master is making himself sick laughing, but you and I will evacuate our young friend, and Anakin will cover for us, and declare the shuttle we’ll be… let’s say liberating, lost in this fight.”

“Are you sure your head feels fine? I’m not convinced this is only a cut,” Skywalker says, because apparently he can’t imagine his old teacher doing any of this without a concussion.

“Hmprpmphhh,” young Fett shouts, behind his gag.

“I’m in.”

 

******

 

The less said about thirty-eight hours on a shuttle with an ultimately concussed Jedi Master and a murderous teenager, the best.

 

******

 

“I will do it if Suu, my wife, agrees,” Cut says, when they come in the dead of night, with a stolen shuttle and the most homicidal protégé you could imagine. He’s a good man, that brother. Rex feels lightheaded at the risks he puts him and his family through. Boba is dangerous, and Kenobi could denounce Cut as a deserter. Rex didn’t think he would, but it was still a colossal risk, for a sullen little murderer, one which doesn’t seem grateful and is calling everybody vulgar names. The moment where Kenobi bows, very ceremonially, to Cut, and thanks him with a rare warmth in his voice, puts something, some malicious half-formed fear, to rest.

Soon Boba is in bed, in a locked room without windows, but Cut explained to him, very patiently, that they would prepare another one, together, when Boba would be… more ready to stay and that tomorrow, Cut would start carving a personalized bedhead for him, like the ones his new sister and brother have. Boba insulted him, and the kids too, but the menace of having his mouth cleaned with soap by his new mother seemed a good motivation to shut up.

The General and Rex stay in the barn, camping on straw from some cereal Rex can’t name. It’s blue with a nice sent and comfortable, but he can’t seem to sleep. His belly is full of good meat and good ale, Boba is safe, they’re safe; he should be snoozing like a Rancor after mating season but sleep doesn’t come, and he knows why.

Obi-wan Kenobi is meditating, three meters from him, and the light of the moon cascading from the skylight paints him as something very much Jedi, very much inhuman.

“But I am,” Kenobi says, in the silence of the barn. He opens his eyes. They have never been more beautiful, captivating in the cold light, almost mesmerizing.

“Human, I mean,”he continues and Rex hiccups, more awkward than ever.

“Are you reading my mind, sir?”

“Obi-wan. Call me Obi-wan. We committed a felony together, after all.”

“Does it qualify like one? A felony?”

“No, it was basic human compassion.”

“Some people would tell you I am not human.”

“Some people are idiots that should have their heads examined by Kix on a medical warpath.”

“I’m sorry, Obi-wan.”

“What are you apologising for?”

“I called you inhuman in my mind.”

“I shouldn’t have listened in. You have the right to your privacy, I didn’t intend to pry. Your mind was just very open, and I was too relaxed.”

“That seems like a good thing. It doesn’t happen often, if you listen to Cody.”

“Cody shouldn’t gossip like that.”

“Well, si…Obi-wan, us clones need to complain about generals once in a while. You can’t even imagine some of the things General Secura does sometimes. And General Koon! And I…I don’t like when other people compare us to clanckers, so I shouldn’t put yourself or other Jedi in the same position. You’re human, all of you. Well, some are Devaronian or Twi’lek or other, but you see what I mean.”

General Kenobi, Obi-wan, smiles.

“I understand Force-users can be inconvenient. Senator Organa tells me I should curb my tendency to answer question before they are asked, every time I speak before the Senate on behalf of the Order.”

“You use your power for good. You protect my brothers and all the people you can. You shouldn’t be ashamed of what you are.”

“As you shouldn’t be ashamed of what you are.”

 _Touché_. Rex smiles and then tries to explain.

“I’m not ashamed of being a clone, but sometimes I don’t like the way natural-born are saying the word ‘clone’.”

Obi-wan sits closer. Rex’s breathing has a misfiring.

“Yet you don’t ask for the thing that is at the forefront of your mind. I won’t do it. Not… not if you don’t want it enough to ask.” “But you want it.”  “Yes, for some time now. But it is your choice, and it will be always your choice. I won’t presume. Ever. You could want it a minute and change your mind the next and I would respect it. Do you understand that?”  “Yes.” Silence, for a few seconds. 

He’s pretty sure they were talking of the same thing, but still remembers very clearly the lecture about consent from General Shaak Ti when he was younger and she had just found out it wasn’t in their education. There were a lot of diagrams, because she got sidetracked a lot, and it covered human/alien sex with every species they could eventually meet. A lot of brothers are still virgins because they still don’t have recovered from the graphics about Bothan/human sex.

Rex… Rex had met a very nice Devaronian lady once but still, it’s not the same. It’s _General Kenobi_ , and it’s so important he even thinks of denying it, for fear of botching it. Still, he has enough courage to power an entire legion.

“Can I kiss you?” Rex asks, and Obi-wan says yes. A kiss becomes two kisses, becomes three kisses, and soon they’re snuggling in the straw, faltering caresses and quiet words.

The Force flows around them, rejoicing of this moment and Obi-wan lets himself hope.


End file.
